The latest blog entry from Steven Sinofsky about Windows 8 describes the Storage Spaces functionality . From the blog entry it seems Windows 8 is getting something ZFS-like. The Storage Spaces can be created in the command line via Powershell, or in the Control Panel for the ones that prefer a more mouse-friendly interface.

I think this is a very positive improvement in Windows 8. Especially for the server environment, or for users with lots of storage needs.

1. It's not just a reimplementation of existing windows logical and dynamic disks. It isn't even RAID 1, 0, or 5. It's a system that allows you to specify redundancy like RAID 1, or parity with RAID 5 or 6 like redundancy.

3. Over-provisioning is a nice feature because it means you can "set it and forget it." No need to do lengthy NTFS resizes and RAID rebuilds in the future when you need to add space. Simply pop in a new disk. You really reduce the risk of doing resizes and rebuilds too.

4. It can intelligently repopulate the 256MB chunks as needed, instead of rebuild the whole array.

6. Yes it doesn't include checksumming built into the storage pool (AFAIK so far), but it does provide an API to checksum the data you have on the storage pool. This allows you to have a program choose the correct copy of the data from the pool, and restore from that (assuming you have redundancy).

7. It lets you specify a backing device for the journal (similar to Linux), so you could put the journal on a SSD for the storage pool, and really speed up the slowest parts of calculating parity and keeping a consistent state.

All in all, it isn't ZFS, or even provide nearly as much flexibility as some of Linux's solutions, but it is a major improvement to Windows when dealing with lots of data.

Even for the average user, the background scrubbing and online NTFS checks will help catch errors before they get worse.